She started crying. I reached for her. She turned away.
Two days later, Goldi told me she wanted a divorce.
“You Don’t Mean That”
I actually laughed, because the idea seemed physically impossible. We’d been married four years. Three weeks earlier she’d been folding tiny baby clothes and arguing with me over whether the nursery needed a second lamp. Now she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She wouldn’t touch our baby.
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“I do.”
“Because Leo has Down syndrome?”
She said nothing.
Her silence became the answer I carried for the next eighteen years.
Within a week she’d signed away sole custody, declined all visitation, packed one suitcase, and walked out of our apartment. Before she left, she paused beside Leo’s crib. I watched from the doorway, certain, for one flickering second, that she was about to pick him up.
Instead she whispered something I couldn’t hear, pressed two fingers to her lips, and walked out the door.
